Redem workshop: Voter-centred vs Politician-centred Perspectives on Democracy

The REDEM Workshop on Voter-centred vs Politician-centred Perspectives on Democracy sought to engage with salient questions concerning voting and democracy. It explored the different lenses through which voters and politicians look at these questions. Through its inter-disciplinary approach, the workshop has blended normative and empirically-oriented approaches within four debate panels. At the same time, the event had a strong public engagement component through its two roundtables, which drew on the knowledge and the experience of key electoral stakeholders - academics, politicians, prominent civil society experts on elections, and journalists. The topics presented and debated in the panels included questions on electoral clientelism, the different understandings of political representation, the ethical challenges of technological advances for voting (e.g., e-voting), the problem of voter motivation, the morality of abstaining from voting (especially in the case of referenda), and the electoral implications of dual citizenship, to name just a few. While some of the topics were discussed at a more general level, the workshop put a special emphasis on the specifics of the Romanian and Eastern European contexts in order to shed light on the particular electoral experiences that voters and politicians experience within this geographic space, experiences which in turn shape their own views on democracy and voting.